What's the OLDEST wine you've drunk?

1981 HENSCHKE HILL OF GRACE on my 21st bday in 02. Was amazzzing

okay a friend gifted me two bottles of 1965 Charles Krug Napa Valley Pinot Noir, and two bottles of undated Paul Masson pinot noir, probably from the same era (they were stored in the same box)

Pinot is not a wine that normally ages very well; The Krug might actually be okay or even really good, no idea how they were stored... I might open a bottle this summer, with decanting & maybe filtering

Split a bottle of Thunderbird that had been opened at least a year before and left sitting on top of a refrigerator once.

we were just talking about Thunderbird the other night, and its ilk: Night Train, Richards Wild Irish Rose, Mogen David et al

I don't see them as much as I used to, even in the roughest shops... feels like they've been supplanted by Four Loko and shit like that, stuff that comes in tall cans
I did see Boone's Farm recently

My fancy aunt gifted my older brother six bottles of Sauternes on the day of his birth. For me it was six bottles of medium-good red (can’t remember the grape). They existed, poorly stored, in my parents basement and survived, as it were, through several basement floods.

At age 29 I convinced my parents to let me take them and drink them. The reds were mostly destroyed, rotted corks, but the two bottles that survived were opened. The first and only glass caused me to have a hallucination, and it was decidedly undelicious. I cooked with the rest.

The Sauternes (34 years old) had lost their labels, looked frightful, but the corks were intact. The wine was spectacular. It was sweeter than contemporary Sauternes, and oddly unguent without being sickly. It was wonderful

Sauternes and other 'dessert' wines can have really long, long lives as long as they're stored on the side

Riesling can also live forever, which is kinda rare for white wine

Always liked this Hugh Johnson' anecdote:

From the book "Hugh Johnson's Wine History", the famous English wine connoisseur and author who was able to taste the the penultimate bottle wrote:

"Perhaps the oldest bottle of wine ever drunk (with pleasure) - it was 421 years old - was uncorked in London in 1961. It was a Steinwein, i.e. a wine from the steep Stein site above Würzburg, the beautiful baroque city on the Main ... the 1540s Würzburger Stein was still alive. Nothing had made it clear to me until then that wine is truly a living organism, for this brown, Madeira-like liquid in front of me still held the active elements of life that it had absorbed from the sun that summer long ago. In a way that was difficult to grasp, this wine even hinted at its German origin. We were able to take about two sips of the centuries-old substance, before it died of exposure to the air, gave up its spirit..."

This wine, which dates back to the time of Shakespeare and the reformer Martin Luther, was harvested in the legendary wine year 1540. This vintage is still considered a "millennium wine" today.

Decades ago my Dad was given a bottle of 1946 Chateau Yquem, and it's still sitting under the stairs in the familial home. It's now worth thousands if the internet is to be believed, so I doubt we'll ever drink it, it'll probably get sold eventually. I once had some French pear liqueur that had been bottled in 1929. It was powerful stuff.

2022

I drank a 1975 Rioja in San Sebastien a few years ago. It was pretty much perfect - fruit still intact but lots of secondary savory stuff going on as well.